Why Do Europeans Think American Women Are Easy
'American Women Are Rude' 'Visiting Englishmen Are No Roses'; 'American Women Are Rude'
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March 29, 1964
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ONE of the deepest traumas experienced by every Englishman who comes to America — and, these days, that's almost every Englishman — is that of encountering, for the first time, in quantity and in her own native habitat, the American woman. Blind terror, a desire to learn judo, and a willingness to marry any girl who'll sit at home of nights and sew are some of the symptoms usually associated with this confrontation.
"American women are generally rude," said one visiting Englishman, still shaking from a recent encounter in a New York drugstore in which he had been hoicked off his stool by one of the breed. Another found American women fickle ("You don't really know how well you're doing," he said).
Others are likely to brood over an age‐old mystery that Europeans have never really been able to solve. They will observe that, though they are, properly enough, fascinated by the American girl, they are disturbed to discover that she grows up into the American woman. On the one hand, you have the young American girl, trim, smart, apparently just unwrapped from Cellophane packing, looking as fresh as a Daisy Miller. And on the other, you have the middle‐aged American woman, with her shrieking voice and parchment skin, growing money‐trees, doing plant‐prayer, gossiping about her neighbors and scouring through genealogies for a regal connection.
All these comments are, of course, classical symptoms of the cultural divide that still separates the two Englishspeaking peoples, and I propose to take this occasion, on the authority of several years' research, to try to clear up some of the confusions associated with the AngloAmerican male‐female reiationship:
(1) It should be remembered that American women are, from the European point of view, men. A European visitor is likely, in the early days of his visit, to forget this. Yet, of course, years of emancipation have given American womenfolk personalities, opinions, leisure, money, careers and all the other characteristics of male power. At the same time, male authority has been diminished, male spending power has been reduced, and all fathers have been symbolically slaughtered. Thus the female has a rare charismatic power.
I remember once taking a frightened, hasty walk through the New York offices of Vogue, a central shrine of American womanhood. All over the building, career girls sat at their desks, typing and correcting proofs, smart, svelte, each one wearing a hat. I realized afterward that the hats were like those skulls medieval philosophers kept in their studies; they were memento mori to remind them what they really were.
(2) It should also be remembered that American girls are the product of enormous capital investment. Every country has something that it particularly likes to spend money on. Thus, in Germany it is veal; in England it is dogs; in the United States it is the young American girl. Such girls are a form of conspicuous consumption, like Christmas trees outside office buildings.
BECAUSE they are the products of such attention, young American girls can be very selective indeed about their standards, their clothes and their boy friends. In the Middle West, this selectivity is ritualized into something called rating dating; this means that a girl dates with men who bring her more and more prestige until finally, as with a thermometer, the mercury settles and she knows who she really is. This is a form of arranged marriage, in fact, in which the girl herself does the arranging; it would be considered old‐fashioned in Europe, where marriage is supposedly for love. This period of choosing is the most important period in any girl's life, and marriage is necessarily a come down.
Thus all those middle‐aged ladies who, fresh from scavenging through Europe, sit in the bars on ocean liners, tipping waiters and apparently grind ing their diamonds between their teeth, are really looking sadly into their drinks and wishing they were girls again. And thus it is that whenever you speak to some women's club—the Daughters of Benedict Arnold, or whatever it may be—on "Africa—Whither?" Madam Chairman will rise, put on her diamond‐encrusted glasses and say, "Hi, gals." To any European woman in the audience, coming from a location where it is more prestigious to be old than to be young, this would be rude. It is, of course, simply politeness.
(3) It should further be remembered that American women have little sense of difficulty. "Very demanding" is what American women are often said to be. But as an English friend of mine, with an American wife, put it to me behind some vine plants at a party, "The thing about American women is they don't understand what's meant by 'difficult.' For instance, my wife keeps having these ideas. She'll get up in the morning and say, 'I've had this great idea; I'm going to have my legs plated with gold.' That kind of thing. I tell her I can't afford it, it's too difficult, and she says, But money is a means and not an end,' I keep saying to her, 'Do you realise our relationship is an ulcersyndrome?'"
THE high expectations of the American women devolve particularly upon her menfolk, of whom the greatest courtesy is expected. A man shows his interest in a girl by performing innumerable ritual politenesses—opening car doors for her, carrying such small packages as she has about her, presenting her regularly with gifts, and the like.
The pattern appears to the visitor to be positively European. There is, however, one difference. In Europe this is done because the female cannot really expect these things, and they are, therefore, tokens of great esteem. In America they are done for the opposite reason—the female can, and does, insist on them, and if a man is not requisitely polite, she can be very rude indeed.
THIS to some extent explains the notorious fickleness of American women. My English friend, for instance, reported that in his bachelor days he had an affectionate relationship with a girl which seemed to be going marvelously well. One evening, however, he took her out to dinner, as was his wont, and she revealed that she'd had a busy day—she had got married. "It turned out she thought I was taking her for granted," said my friend, "and she wanted to show me."
In Europe, then, the female is relatively pliant and neutral; but in America she is rude in order to enforce male politeness. This can be seen in the fact that this politeness continues into subsequent matrimony; it is an impersonal feature of the situation. Politeness and rudeness in Europe is usually personal, whereas in America both are institutionalized responses, which seem to exist before any situation that might call them into being. And what confuses the European is that in America the woman carries on both the female role of the recipient of courtesy, and the male role of deciding when it should be provided. There is, however. one more point:
(4) It should, finally, be remembered that one nation's rudeness is another nation's manners. And so the foreigner is never quite sure whether Americans, generally, are being rude or not. I remember once a New York cabbie said to me, while I was waiting for him to open the taxi door and let me descend, "Whatsa matter, Mac, no legs?" It is quite possible, and even likely, that he was being, in his own way, perfectly amiable. As my English friend pointed out, "The thing about Americans is that they're so nice. But sometimes it sounds so like other peoples' being nasty that you have to be very careful indeed."
THUS it is that the American woman who, at a party, analyzes your psychological make‐up, questionsall your standards, doubts, your virility and accuses you of total moral corruption—leaving you finally in a discarded heap by the wall —is not in any way trying to be rude. Quite the contrary: She is being very polite and social, because she is creating a relationship. As an American femme fatale once said to me, "I always think hostility is so much more friendly than total indifference."
The curious mixture of toughness and hospitality that has the Englishman rocking on his feet is characteristic. My English friend summed it up by saying, "They want you to know they're hospitable but, on the other hand, they don't want you to think you can take them for a ride."
Hence Americans have to be very rude before they are actually being rude. So often they are simply being nice. The interesting problem is that of discovering how to know when they are really, actually being rude, personally rude, to you. The trouble for an Englishman is that finding out means watching, questioning, prying —and that is, after all, very rude indeed.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1964/03/29/archives/american-women-are-rude-visiting-englishmen-are-no-roses-american.html
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